State v. Diloreto

850 A.2d 1226, 180 N.J. 264, 2004 N.J. LEXIS 694
CourtSupreme Court of New Jersey
DecidedJune 28, 2004
StatusPublished
Cited by65 cases

This text of 850 A.2d 1226 (State v. Diloreto) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of New Jersey primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Diloreto, 850 A.2d 1226, 180 N.J. 264, 2004 N.J. LEXIS 694 (N.J. 2004).

Opinion

Justice VERNIERO

delivered the opinion of the Court.

Relying on information supplied by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the police in this case believed that defendant was an “endangered” missing person when they discovered him apparently asleep in a parked car. The officers awakened defendant, conversed with him, and then asked him to exit the car. The officers decided to place defendant in their police vehicle while they awaited confirmation of his status as a missing person. Before doing so, they patted down defendant’s outer clothing, discovering a loaded ammunition clip in his pocket. That discovery ultimately led to the retrieval of a handgun from defendant’s car. We affirm the Appellate Division’s judgment upholding the warrantless seizure of those objects against defendant’s constitutional challenge.

I.

We derive our summary of facts largely from testimony presented at a suppression hearing conducted by the trial court. On March 19, 1998, defendant’s brother reported defendant as a missing person to the police department in Jefferson Township, Morris County. The police, in turn, reported defendant’s name to the NCIC, which houses a national network of information authorized by Congress and made available to federal and local criminal justice agencies. See 28 U.S.C. § 534.

*270 In their initial report to the NCIC, the police considered defendant to be “a missing person with involuntary status.” That designation was changed after a detective from the county prosecutor’s office reviewed it and determined that defendant’s status should have been denominated as “endangered.” The detective testified at the suppression hearing:

Endangered is the catch-all phrase that the local police departments and the State Police use regarding adult missing persons. The most important thing [is] to get a missing person into the system as missing and if they don’t fit any of the other criteria, meaning disability, a catastrophic victim, or a kidnapping, we put them in under the endangered [status].

On March 21, 1998, two days after his initial call, defendant’s brother again telephoned the police to inform them that defendant was no longer missing. In response, an officer attempted to remove defendant’s name from the NCIC’s computer database. The officer did not succeed in that effort apparently because he had entered “John K. Diloreto” into the computer rather than the exact name contained in the database, “John Kenny Diloreto.” Because the NCIC’s computer system rejected the attempts to cancel the Diloreto alert, defendant’s name remained in the system during the period relevant to this appeal.

On April 8, 1998, at about 10:30 p.m., a police officer in Fairfield, Essex County, was on patrol in a marked police ear. He spotted a vehicle in the parking lot of a hotel facing U.S. Highway 46. According to the officer, the ear attracted his attention because it was parked at an angle between two other vehicles, exhaust was emanating from its tailpipe, and its windows were fogged. He also knew of reports from that location of automobile thefts and attempted suicides.

The officer ran a check of the car’s license plate number using a mobile data terminal (MDT). There was a positive retrieval of data, known as a “hit,” which revealed that the vehicle’s last user was listed as an endangered missing person. The data also provided identifying information as well as the agency that had reported the person missing. The MDT’s buzzer sounded as an alarm to the officer that the foregoing information had been *271 retrieved. On direct examination at the suppression hearing, the officer explained:

Q Okay. And can you tell us what an NCIC hit is in your understanding?
A It’s a positive response from the NCIC information center that information that I had put into the computer was coming back with information regarding other than what was normal — a normal printout, a normal readout.
Q And you referred] to an alarm of some sort?
A Yes, sir.
Q Can you tell us what that was?
A The alarm was for a — it was attached to the vehicle, when I typed in the license plate it came back that — the registered owner of the vehicle, but then the alarm sounded that a person who was last occupying that vehicle was listed in the computer [as] a missing person.
Q And how does the computer give you that information? How does it display it or otherwise convey it to you?
A The information is displayed on the MDT screen itself, on the computer screen. Q And in this particular case what was it displaying?
A It had displayed the owner of the vehicle, the registration information regarding the vehicle, and then immediately following that said missing person [ ], endangered and it gave the particulars of the person that was in the want — in the hit.

After receiving the NCIC alert, the officer called for assistance. He also noticed that the tailpipe of the parked vehicle was no longer emitting fumes and concluded “[t]hat the engine had been shut off.” A second officer arrived a few minutes later.

After that arrival, the first officer approached the parked car and shone his flashlight into it. The officer testified that, without the aid of a flashlight, he “couldn’t see inside the car because of the condition of its [fogged] windows[.]” He saw that a man, defendant, was inside and appeared to be asleep, leaning back with his head against the vehicle’s frame or seat. The officer attempted to open the car door, but it was locked. He knocked on the car window, seemingly awakening defendant. After defendant rolled down his window, the officer asked for identification. Defendant produced a driver’s license and social security card, which matched the name of the missing person.

The officer returned to his police car. He radioed his headquarters, requesting that a call be made to the police in Jefferson Township to “verify the hit.” Again, the officer explained:

*272 Q Why do you do that, verify the hit?
A To validate it, make sure that in cases of criminal wants that you’re not arresting the wrong person, but in this case it would be a welfare check to ensure the welfare and well-being of the individual named in the want.
Q What is your understanding of the characterization of missing? When you get that over your MDT what does that convey to you? What did it convey to you in this particular situation?
A Missing person is somebody that was reported by concerned individuals as to have been missing, not being seen, an unaccounted whereabouts.
Q Now I think you’ve already answered this, but how did you attempt to verify that information from Jefferson?

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Bluebook (online)
850 A.2d 1226, 180 N.J. 264, 2004 N.J. LEXIS 694, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-diloreto-nj-2004.